San Salvador mayor seeks help with gangs on San Francisco visit

SAN FRANCISCO

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, December 5, 2007

SALVADOR05_120_LH.JPG San Salvador's mayor Violeta Menjivar gives San Francisco supervisor Tom Ammiano a gift during a visit to City Hall accompanied by Ana Perez (in pink, seated) from the Central American Resource Center. Next to her is Jose Artiga, executive director of SHARE foundation who is translating for Menjivar.
Liz Hafalia/The Chronicle/San Francisco/12/5/07
**Violeta Menjivar, Tom Ammiano, Ana Perez, Jose Artiga cq �2007, San Francisco Chronicle/ Liz Hafalia
MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE. NO SALES- MAGS OUT. less

SALVADOR05_120_LH.JPG San Salvador's mayor Violeta Menjivar gives San Francisco supervisor Tom Ammiano a gift during a visit to City Hall accompanied by Ana Perez (in pink, seated) from the Central American ... more

Photo: Liz Hafalia

San Salvador mayor seeks help with gangs on San Francisco visit

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Salvadoran community leaders welcomed the mayor of San Salvador to San Francisco on Tuesday in hope of establishing a sister city relationship that could go beyond the usual trade delegations and cultural exchanges and tackle a grittier issue: an escalating transnational gang problem.

"Gang violence in San Salvador now impacts our youth," said Ana Pérez, director of the Central American Resource Center, a 22-year-old family service organization in San Francisco. "If our kids get deported, they end up in a world of extreme violence there. ... And now we have youths fleeing from El Salvador because of the gangs," who wind up as the street-level dealers for the same syndicates in San Francisco.

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Violeta Menjivar, the first woman to govern El Salvador's sprawling capital of 2 million people, told community leaders and city officials she is willing and eager for a collaborative relationship, but she cautioned, "It will take work."

At City Hall, Menjivar, a physician who was elected from the party of the leftist FMLN, the former guerrillas who fought the U.S.-backed Salvadoran government in the 1980s, addressed the Board of Supervisors and met with the mayor's staff.

Supervisor Tom Ammiano said he would push for a sister city relationship.

"It's goodwill. It's trade, but there are other ways to have sister cities," he said. "If we're dealing with problems around youth, this could offer a practical approach to that."

Supervisor Gerardo Sandoval talked with Menjivar about sharing gang prevention efforts, such as the resource center's tattoo removal program, that would be a good way to help break the international cycle of violence.

"Unfortunately, the lack of jobs in El Salvador leads to delinquency there, and some of that is transported to the United States," Sandoval said after the meeting. "As a former criminal attorney, I had many young clients from Central America. They're being used. And they're deported back there with very little future."

Central America's most notorious gang, the Mara Salvatrucha, began in the 1980s in Los Angeles among Salvadoran immigrant youth whose families had fled their country's brutal civil war. When gang members got into trouble with the law, they were deported to El Salvador, a country that some had left as infants. The gang, also known as MS 13, was re-created in El Salvador in the 1990s by those deportees.

Now with transnational ties, the Mara appears to be moving young recruits north to become a pliant underage workforce, said Roberto Gonzalez, coordinator of the Central American Resource Center's youth programs.

Teenagers in Central America are expected to work to help support their families, Gonzalez said. But with high unemployment, some kids get hooked up with trafficking rings that bring them into this country. Once here and indebted to the traffickers, they wind up dealing drugs for them and living in gang-run "safe houses" in San Francisco and Oakland, he said. When they get arrested, they often get stuck in juvenile hall because they have no family here to whom they can be released.

"These youth, if we deport them, they'll be back next week in the Tenderloin selling drugs again," said Gonzalez, who offers tattoo removal and a raft of education, job training and mental health services to help get kids out of gangs. "It'll be a continuous cycle until we can give them an option outside of that."

Pérez and her staff spent the morning with Menjivar over a conference table spread with pan dulce and black coffee. The staff described its work providing immigration advice, dental care, family counseling and tattoo removal for thousands of the Bay Area's estimated 78,000 Salvadorans, as well as other Mexican and Central American immigrants. And they pressed the mayor on what she is doing to address the root causes of migration and gang violence.

"We do have youth programs, but nothing specifically to help reintegrate deportees," she said. "There were 20,000 deportations from the United States last year, and we don't have the resources to work with them."

What her country needs most - to curb the influence of gangs and to stop the hemorrhaging of out-migration - is employment, said Menjivar, who stopped in San Francisco on the way home from Europe, where she was courting foreign aid and investment.

Perhaps, said Sandoval, a sister city relationship that fosters investment in El Salvador is a small part of the solution.

"The federal government's approach to immigration reform right now is to build a $12 billion border fence," he said. "We need to create jobs in Latin America so people don't have to come here. The city of San Francisco can set an example."